Augmented Translation and the Future of Human Translators

The rise of ever-improving neural machine translation and the improvement of other translation technologies is dramatically changing the working environment of professional linguists. Increasingly, translators and interpreters are required to use machine translation and other technologies, but many linguists find themselves pushed to the end of the line in terms of their ability to effect meaningful change or control. By contrast, an emerging approach known as “Augmented Translation” is putting linguists back into the center. Augmented Translation is combination of machine translation, improved translation memory, next-generation terminology tools, automated content enrichment (ACE), lights-out project management, and other technologies. The goal is to automate tasks that do not require human intervention and to provide need information in a just-in-time fashion to make linguists more efficient, thus freeing them up to work on those parts of content that need their attention. Doing so increases their productivity and makes their work more valuable even as the per-word cost of translation decreases. Dr. Arle Lommel will discuss how these technologies are changing the language industry and how translators and interpreters need to prepare for their augmented future.